– George F. Brown, Jr. is a business strategy consultant specializing in business-to-business growth issues. Reuters spoke to him about the topic of a new book he co-authored, CoDestiny: Overcome Your Growth Challenges by Helping Your Customers Overcome Theirs (Greenleaf Book Group). –

Q: You talk about what happens when a business becomes a bull’s eye, that is, the target of rivals looking to undercut by price. How does this happen to small companies when they’re rarely dominant players in their market?A: Small business is rarely the largest provider to a large company, but I’ve seen quite a few instances where a small business is a key supplier to another small business.

Big Brother has the capability to watch – and respond to – your every spending move. That’s the premise behind Toovio, a startup that has created technology to help retailers and other consumer-facing companies market personalized offers to their customers in real time.

Think of the scene in the film “Minority Report”, when Tom Cruise’s character is walking through a mall while his eyes are getting scanned and he is being bombarded by a slew of personalized 3D ads.

About Deborah L.

"Deborah Cohen writes a weekly column on small business for Reuters.com. Small business coverage is a big change for Deborah, a former staff writer with Reuters, Crain’s Chicago Business, Bloomberg News and the Post-Tribune in Gary, Ind., whose prior beats focused on large public companies in the fast-food, telecommunications and advertising industries. She has written for Business Week's Chicago edition, the American Bar Association's ABA Journal, Indianapolis Monthly magazine, QSR magazine, Forward magazine, and Bloomberg magazine, among other publications."